#692 – Like a steam engine in your house

Chris Gammell: the time has come once again for our 2025 listener survey and this year we're extra excited to do this because past guest kevin capuccio from jumperless has donated three jumperless boards as prizes for people that are drawn randomly for answering the survey so if you're interested in letting us know more about who you are what you like to do with electronics and how you like listening to the amp hour please fill out the survey and be entered to win a jump list and as always thanks for listening to the show this is the amp hour podcast released april 15th 2025 episode 692 like a steam engine in your house

Dave Jones: welcome to the amp hour i'm dave jones from the eev blog and i'm Chris Gammell of contextual

Chris Gammell: electronics hey dude it's been a while we're like uh once a month once a month all right

Dave Jones: all right it's been so long uh podcasts still a thing i don't i don't know good question i i know i think they are because i was in the lift like um yesterday and you know guys are talking oh yeah i listen to this podcast right no they said uh unfortunately you're not on twitter but i caught up with meddy i caught up with our friend meddy and um he was in sydney um sorry for those for those who don't know for those who don't know and um of course hugely popular like he's got like six seven million subscribers now or something so he's like mainstream popular so i posted this meme on twitter about how i was uh walking the streets of my own city with meddy and nobody recognized me but everyone recognized him so oh boy so yeah that's the thing yep yep yep happens were you like uh i was

Chris Gammell: thinking of that scene in uh uh one of the adventures movies where paul rudd's like he's like hey you want hey i'm in man do you want to do you want like a one photo with me oh right no no no right

Dave Jones: yep similar thing uh i mean by i'm kind of exaggerating because only one person recognized him but you know it's still it was fun of course right it was like yeah so that's great how's meddy doing he's done yeah excellent yes yes he's going he's doing great so i'm booming around the world huh yep yep unfortunately like everyone assumed that oh my god electrobooms meeting ev blog there's going to be this huge collaboration and it's like no we just like hung out for lunch and walked around the streets of the city sorry um it wasn't that exciting not everybody records a podcast from

Chris Gammell: the road when they go to sydney you know like it's only a select few they can hop in a car

Dave Jones: i will send you the i'll send you the uh image of the meme image that i uh okay that's great that i posted yeah it's the say keanu um me oh oh yeah and keanu and oh yeah yeah the say keanu is one of my

Chris Gammell: favorites it's a good one yeah he's just eating tacos man like he just wants to be you know just doing

Dave Jones: his thing and there he is with one of the um people on the street who recognized him and oh there we go okay sent you another photo there you go okay so yeah anyway that was fun that's great fun to finally meet up with meddy um yeah and yeah it was great and like we we did actually um do we did attempt to find some powerpoints and we did um in an underground basement car park we found a bunch of powerpoints

Chris Gammell: none of them bloody worked so we couldn't do anything sorry you were you were actually trying to like

Dave Jones: maybe make like a short video yeah yeah i see yeah of course why wouldn't you because that's kind of his thing right got it yeah but i had to explain to him how they called powerpoints here and he didn't know that he thought he he calls them outlets yeah that's what i call them yeah yeah right we know they're powerpoints where that comes from i don't know um sure we could grow it speaking of wallpower

Chris Gammell: um yeah i didn't mention this before the show but i i'm locked in man i'm i'm getting solar and i'm getting a battery and uh you know cool bananas yeah you're talking about that stuff maybe so yeah i'm

Dave Jones: excited i'm very excited so you've signed on the dotted line it's just going to be installed

Chris Gammell: deposit is in and right yeah i've had measurements and the joists look good i guess excellent i don't know i i had this interesting interaction with the surveyor who was like here he's you know like just figuring out like where's the cable runs gonna go like on the house and stuff like that and i'm asking him because some of the panels are going on my like i have a separate garage and the panels are going in the separate garage because that's like southern facing that's like the best the best stuff that i have uh and and it's pretty far away from where the box is you know i was like you know like what about like the drop it's like i know it's like a high voltage dc it's pushing some power but like there's probably a pretty significant drop through the the cables and like man i i couldn't get through like i i don't he's like i don't know what you're talking about oh right right because he's just you know like there's like resistance and he's like i'm sorry i'm sorry i don't know a thing yeah and it's totally fine because i would you know he probably knew more about conduit than i will ever know in my entire life like i just had three lifetimes right like this guy was a mechanical person he's like you know joyce and conduit and cable runs whatever but boy did i fail as an electronics communicator in the moment you know all right i'm gonna get away for it i'll be right back

Dave Jones: out here you know oh now this is ohm's law yeah right exactly right yeah interesting what about

Chris Gammell: this drop it's a significant drop i mean like it's not a short run you know like it's not

Dave Jones: no it's not but i assume that you're you've got a string since you you'll have a string based system right so you have like 12 panels how many actual panels totally again two sets of 14 yeah oh two sets of 14 28 panels wow yeah 28 panels all right yeah it's like a 12 kilowatt system

Chris Gammell: it's a oh wow that's pretty bad yeah yeah yeah it's it's gonna be good it's um 13 kilowatt hour battery yeah it is powerwall three is it oh okay so it's a tesla okay yeah um surprisingly it gets the best so i think i mentioned on the show before but duke energy the place where i live um yeah uh the power company they pay you monthly to like have access to your battery maybe i didn't mention this on the show but it's it's an interesting thing it's basically a virtual power plant um that other

Dave Jones: you know so like yes they can use it as required for grid stability yada yada yeah like 5 p.m every

Chris Gammell: day if i have juice in the box and they want access to it they get like 36 events and so they pay me a flat rate per month to do that and uh and then different battery packs i guess with different power availability too like it's it was interesting like they have like the whole chart and some of the actual capacity you know there might be another battery pack that's like another 13 kilowatt hour battery pack that's paid less so i don't know if it's like the software integration or the battery or like the uh the inverter's capability to push power back in the grid but it wasn't the same amount

Dave Jones: you know it was right it was surprising so um so yeah there's like i don't know enough about the tesla powerwall it's not an inverter right it doesn't have an inverter built in does it does it does have a bit yeah it does now okay so you feed the strings straight in okay so it's got the right

Chris Gammell: yeah so i'll have to like two landing strip that there there was an interesting teardown-ish video of it and yeah it looks very very nice i mean like the outside is super slick you know like oh yeah the engineering in it's yeah but like the the incoming like there's like i think you can have up to six strings coming into it like six strings yeah yeah six but geez yeah it there's a power

Dave Jones: that's an insane size inverter in there then wow i think it's more for getting more strings

Chris Gammell: more shorter strings so i don't know yeah right okay yes yeah yeah yeah because each each string

Dave Jones: will have like a minimum and a maximum voltage on it and you've can't you can't just hook up anything you know you've got to sort of like be and then um you've got the startup voltage of the string so you've got a like you can't just put if you put the minimum number of panels um on your string well that's great in theory but what about in wintertime or shading etc etc right you're like you you never get to the startup voltage of that string so you could waste half or three quarters of your day and a string doesn't even start up so yeah it's a trade-off you know you have to be careful setting these things up it isn't just you know oh yeah it's always just going to work no there's minimum and maximum um startup voltages for your solar inverters yep yep it's a big deal

Chris Gammell: yeah yeah totally so it's uh it's gonna be exciting to try it i mean like we'll see how it goes it does seem like there's the big limitation at my house is i do have some trees around so like even though i'll get more sun there'll be shading and stuff like that so it doesn't make a ton of sense if those trees fell full in the future i could probably add more panels on that sort of thing so got it um yeah economics of it are very interesting i think um it is going to be net positive like i'll definitely assuming all everything works out right as as planned right and i think the the modeling software that they showed was really cool like you know they have tons of like sunrise simulator sun sure azimuth simulators all that stuff um and um you know how accurate is the simulation if it's in 20

Dave Jones: i'll still i'll still be okay i think so so you're doing it primarily as one of those customers who's just wants to save money right because what are the other options well if your goal was to be like as off grid you know as possible then you wouldn't be selling your energy back for example then you wouldn't sign up to the plan to sell your energy back to the grid i mean you'd be hogging it

Chris Gammell: yourself you know i mean you're gonna make american jokes here but like i i use way more than this thing's gonna even at you know 13 kilowatt like i'll consume a good portion of this power that i that i

Dave Jones: generate so what is it with you yanks and chewing bloody well because you live in these stupid cold climates where you got to bloody heat everything why else you know hot climates you know yeah yeah

Chris Gammell: yeah i think it's really uh how we heat and cool homes like it's a whole home thing versus a per room thing so i think that's that is a big contributor uh i think you guys operate a little warmer than we do

Dave Jones: honestly i think you're i mean i don't think it gets as humid where you are crapping on about like boilers and things like this and like an aussie guys what the hell is a boiler you know it's like

Chris Gammell: what it's like a steam engine in your house don't understand it's just steam engine in your house don't get it yeah don't get it yeah it's just not a thing situations it actually does make sense for like distribution networks right right you think about the alternative so if like having one like central power plant effectively in a apartment building and then distributing it and having it like individually controlled with a uh got it what's it called like a valve uh you know steam release valve

Dave Jones: so hmm yeah into speaking of batteries we're about to have a federal election here which means uh money printer go brr and uh the government's um uh well the current government is trying to get back in um i go in free batteries for everyone or you know i think it's four thousand dollars for everyone who wants a battery it's like yeah i just installed my battery thank you very much um so yeah it's um money printer go brr so everyone will get four thousand dollars for installing a battery now oh that's interesting

Chris Gammell: so i think actually you know this is probably you know i'm also getting money for the actual install of my battery so like yep why are they doing it here same reason maybe same reason you know some of it's policy stuff like you're saying but i do think from a offloading perspective right if you think about the the the you know the the costs of like peak power generation yes like it helps reduce that and then also balancing the entire grid and just infrastructure like the strain on the wires at peak load times as well you know you start to have failures i think it really does add up so yeah i think you're probably right in terms of actual motivation but in terms of like payback it might it might actually be it might the numbers might work out it is unfortunately a short-term thick a

Dave Jones: short to medium-term fix because we've basically here in australia we've backed ourselves into a corner because we have the largest uptake of home solar in the world yeah once again due to government subsidies so the uh rich taxpayers subsidize sorry so the taxpayers subsidize rich people who could afford to install solar systems basically and but we have so much solar here now that during the day our prices go negative our wholesale prices of energy go negative because so they basically they will pay you energy companies will pay you to take the energy because there's so much excess due to the solar so now we've um so what that means is that um it's not quite financially viable to do nuclear energy or other baseload solutions like that because we have too much of this bloody solar installed solar is great but you can actually have too much of it on the actual grid and it's causing us problems where yeah we're kind of backed into a corner where well we can't afford uh to do nuclear because it doesn't make financial sense because of all the timelines on that are also oh yeah well timelines but aside from that right yeah it's not financially viable to do it either um even if the timelines weren't there um you know the long timelines weren't there so yeah so we're sort of like stuck where so much solar that we really the only choice is to everyone to install battery system so here you go here's four thousand taxpayer dollars i mean that's not a bad you know i think distributing it though too is also good oh yeah it's it's it's not necessarily bad but long term like if you just look at it from a pure engineering and environmental and other point of view nuclear would probably be the best solution interesting right oh but you know batteries take a lot of mining right and they only last like 15 years and then you've got to replace the whole thing so it's the whole country replacing all their battery packs overall if you're talking long term right big picture then yeah you know nuclear base load is probably the most sensible solution but yeah you know it's just not liable

Chris Gammell: it is interesting yeah i think in terms of like externalities and things like that i think yeah yeah nuclear gets bad rap because of waste product of course is dangerous but like oh waste product

Dave Jones: of batteries you want to go there exactly yeah exactly nobody thinks about that because battery waste product doesn't glow no it it doesn't but it's also very very bad for the environment if you're an environmentalist you know it's it's incredibly bad let alone mining it let alone manufacturing it let alone disposing of it and going through the whole cycle every 15 years yeah yeah yeah um you know and and most of it's going to come from china um unfortunately yeah my yes yeah anyway uh friend of the channel uh peter watkinson who runs who uh designs and manufactures australian batteries here well using cells from china but at least they're an australian designer and manufacturer right and they gather it all together in fact he could get cells from anywhere it doesn't really matter it's just that you know it's currently best to get them from cattle um catl which is one of the major providers in asia right they're one of the byd providers right yes i think the massive yes yes it's one of those yeah they're like top three yeah or whatever something like that um and yeah and you know he's saying that yeah um most of this is going to come from china um unfortunately and everyone goes oh but tesla manufacturer their batteries everyone will buy a tesla yeah not so much um unfortunately the majority of them i think just the demand overall it's just like so much coverage huge i mean we've got i think of what two uh no what is it three million homes in australia have solar and like if a third of the people take them up that's a million installation of batteries right yes it's just it's just crazy um yeah it's just nuts so anyway um yeah money

Chris Gammell: printer go brewer so yep great yeah oh god i was actually watching uh speaking of large batteries i was watching a video last night i was thinking about it because um the powerwall is actually so i have two like distribution boxes one goes out to my garage where there's um and then one goes to my house and i can only like back power the house if there's like a power outage situation that's fine and i was like i wonder you know i do have this uh big battery in the garage known as my car yes and i found this video of this guy who's just pulling off the he's just putting an inverter with like a quick disconnect like a very well made like this is a very good video but quick disconnect just on the 12 volt and i thought he i thought he's gonna be tapping into the high voltage battery so i was like don't do it man don't do it but of course not right like yeah so he can pull off a he was actually doing it on a chevy bolt which is what i have an ev chevy bolt ev off the 12 volt but that's coming

Dave Jones: from the 12 volt lead acid battery no no no so that's the thing so it's coming from it's coming from

Chris Gammell: it's a 62 kilowatt hour battery pack which is wild because that's like four times bigger than the house battery i'm gonna have yeah and then there's a dc to dc can a water cool dc to dc converter that back powers the 12 volt battery but they must have known that it's going to do this because that has a continuous rated output at 125 amps so that can do well that must be specific for

Dave Jones: that car because most evs still the the 12 volt accessory outlet yeah well at least most evs just just off the battery you're saying i'm aware just come from the old school lead acid battery yeah right well and this is this would normally charge the battery charge yeah well that's what mine has mine will actually turn on in the middle of the night and it'll charge that 12 volt battery oh really you know yeah yeah interesting yeah yeah so it'll turn on yeah i'll try and post this video

Chris Gammell: it was fascinating i mean like this guy definitely knows this stuff right okay i'm just you know i'm casual viewer at this point you know i i was watching this and just being like i would never do this

Dave Jones: but i did not know any ev had that sort of power capability backfed into the 12 volts that's interesting right that must be for a specific yeah well there's no like i mean we've we've talked on

Chris Gammell: the show before about like the what is the vehicle to grid vtg vtg vtg yes and your one doesn't have vtg right does not i think they must have put it in until like enabling it software wise at some point that must be like why else would they this is not a cheap thing to do to just add 125 amp like dc to dc converter right you know yeah yeah really it's just like a one kilowatt dc to dc converter effectively it's massive so like unless they were going to do something like that or have a future version that was going to have just a plug on the side of it yeah that's like yeah so anyways he's just basically tapping off that putting it into a commercial inverter that can do two kilowatts i think so it can it could do up to two kilowatts but he's got to fuse down to to do less and um yeah it's great i mean like it was great build great i was flabbergasted so

Dave Jones: and whether or not you go with like your what's called an ac battery yours is an ac battery so it basically can power your entire house if the power fails right um or you go battery the tesla is an ac battery that's the industry term it's called it's of course it has the inverter built in you mean i mean because it has the inverter built in and the house and the house is on the load side oh yeah your entire house so if the power so if so if your mains power fails your house stays up and powered up that's right yes that's why it's called an ac battery it's not actually the battery itself is still dc but of course it's it's just called an ac battery in the industry parlance um got it and yeah so whether or not you have one of those or whether or not you've got one like mine which is essentially a dc battery which only has an emergency power output so if my mains fails my house goes down my house goes completely down but i've got one power point which will stay on which is an emergency power outlet so i can go quick shove all the freezers into there and boom you know like yeah yeah so that which one you choose there really depends on how frequent your power outages are here i'm lucky to get one power outage every five years you know it's pretty rare

Chris Gammell: you're lucky too huh yeah yeah very lucky strange flex there dave

Dave Jones: which is strange because given all the solar on our grid and everyone's going oh that's precarious it could fail at any second never has you know oh so i guess they've i would imagine i mean at least

Chris Gammell: around here the grid doesn't go down because of load right it goes down because of wires getting

Dave Jones: wires where yeah whereas all my local suburbs all it's all underground power yeah totally yeah which

Chris Gammell: is good so yeah yeah they actually came through they were trimming all the trees you know like that's the thing like every five years they come through and they just they just pare back all the trees that are anywhere near a power line so like that's part of the part of the deal here you know it's got it still cheaper than putting wires underground after the fact i think yeah got it yeah so you you said

Dave Jones: that you did did get a subsidy of some sort for this but it's still costing you a absolute boatload

Chris Gammell: isn't it i mean um yeah uh crap ton i could share numbers i don't know should i share numbers

Dave Jones: it's entirely up to you of course we want to hear the numbers i mean it's so it's it's a 32 000

Chris Gammell: system that is a boatload of money no doubt there's a 30 percent federal tax credit which as far as i understand it's still going to go you know all all things asterisk right so you should get 10 grand off that 10 grand back yeah and then the big thing is the and so that's 20 12 kilowatt of solar you know 20 to 28 panels and then the the power wall and the install all that stuff uh and then i get 9k back for the power pair program it's called through duke duke energy they already they've

Dave Jones: already given you a figure even before you've exported the energy it's a fixed amount it you

Chris Gammell: reserve yeah you reserve it that's that's the thing that makes it all really worth it right i was gonna say that's interesting wow this is them basically saying we don't want to build our own infrastructure right they're basically paying me to build infrastructure quote unquote right and then they're gonna rent it from me and like that doesn't make that like i said i from a policy perspective i don't deny that like like you're saying like it probably is a you know taxpayer you know come on vote for us kind of thing but i think from a actual investment like spreading the the risk and stuff like that i think it actually does make some sense granted i'm also a taxpayer and you know a utility user who's benefiting from it so like you know take that as but like really the i think the real thing is the cost of turning on a peaker plant is like so high oh yeah and i think up until probably january of this year there was a lot of like negative pressure on doing that sort of thing because they're often coal they're often natural they're really all natural gas here now because the costs cost differential and just you know you have a fixed cost there too and you have all the costs of like turning on turbines and whatnot whatnot and like okay yeah like maybe we pay people to like borrow some of their power like that someone's doing math somewhere you know there's

Dave Jones: some there's some mbas and spreadsheets i'm sure so yeah well i am currently looking at peak prices today here in here in new south wales and it's 11 000 peak prices are 11 300 per megawatt hour so that's if you convert that to divide that by 11 um so it's over a thousand so it's 11

Chris Gammell: hundred dollars per kilowatt hour wait that doesn't sound right didn't you say 11 000 wouldn't it yes

Dave Jones: 11 000 megawatt hours but divide that by a thousand sorry yeah 11 11 000 divided by a thousand is oh sorry 11 11 11 11 per kilowatt hour right normally power is like 30 cents per kilowatt hour yeah yeah yeah

Chris Gammell: yeah yeah so it's like we're just like it published too that's interesting that it gets published

Dave Jones: yeah oh yeah i can give you a public utility kind of number thing yeah here's the here's the link right now you can you don't have to sign in you can just view the great yeah that's cool and and if you go to the price and demand uh graph it shows you the peak prices today but they only turn on very briefly like they turn on for 10 minutes 20 minutes something like that but yeah it's like a thousand times the rate or something yeah you know right yeah it's very expensive and yeah we can actually monitor that price in real time so that is the market wholesale rate that i'm showing you there so the uh purple

Chris Gammell: graph so if you go to price and demand price and demand price and demand there it is yep okay yeah

Dave Jones: i'll link this in the show notes for people too and yeah oh wow yeah yeah those two purple peaks there they are when they turned on you can see they're around about 5 p.m something like that 5 30 so people have come home from work they turned on everything right they turned on all their cooktops and everything yep yep yep turn on all the kit and caboodle and and of course the solar is dying by that point right exactly so yeah you start to like lose a lot of capability then yep and that's and that's when they have to turn on a couple of these peak i feel like you're gas generating your own

Chris Gammell: point here dave this is why they're giving people four thousand dollars per battery you know with all all knowledge of the other situations but yeah they are that's interesting yeah i've never seen the numbers on it though that's really interesting that they have to see like but the point is

Dave Jones: yeah the point is is that we wouldn't have to do this if we had a proper baseload system and no solar like this right we wouldn't have to do it if we if australia decided 30 years ago that we're going to use that we're going to open nuclear uh power plants everywhere right and then that would cover all our baseload stuff we wouldn't have to do this right this this wouldn't be a thing so you know

Chris Gammell: it's like i wonder you know like the traffic theory where like they um you know like in la they keep

Dave Jones: by building they kept like building wider and wider they expand yeah and the traffic just expands yeah

Chris Gammell: yeah so i just wonder i i don't know i wonder if there's a similar phenomenon i don't know what it

Dave Jones: would be but it's uh right well as as a civilization advances we're going to use more and more of course of course energy that's just a given right so yeah i just wonder like but still you

Chris Gammell: know like we mentioned with the negative pricing too like if uh i think you and i talked offline about like the idea of like uh i don't think we talked about on the show but like you know someone starting up a bitcoin ring is like one way to do it but like also you know like smelters or similar like super high power things that could use that power i think that it's just not economical to do it for whatever the short window is where yeah the sun's really shining 10 20 minutes that you need it's not you know yeah yeah exactly you know they say you gotta you gotta smelt you gotta smelt ore while

Dave Jones: the sun shines right right you know or we can convert salt water we can convert sea water into fresh water you know stuff like that but you can't just like spin up those for 10 minutes you know it's

Chris Gammell: not yeah it's not something that yeah and actually that's where a good argument for baseload because you would be able to do that you'd have like a knowledgeable i'm going to have a consistent smelting that happens because i'm just borrowing from the protons that are smashing into the neutrons

Dave Jones: smash obviously i know nothing about nuclear well if we were to start fresh from now we know okay we've got a country that needs this amount of energy right and okay you simply you would not do any of this solar you would simply install base node base load nuclear energy that had more than way more than that capacity required and then bob's your uncle right and it just like yep that is the way you do it from scratch unfortunately our systems aren't they weren't built you know we can't build

Chris Gammell: well i think if we had perfect knowledge of the future we'd make a lot of different decisions

Dave Jones: yeah so anyway yeah yeah that's the thing anyway yes so even just today prices were minus 23 dollars per megawatt hour sorry they only give it in that's wholesale prices yeah um they jump up to megawatt hours not kilowatt hours yeah um yeah it was minus 22 megawatt hours and a few hours later boom it's up to um 11 um thousand dollars per megawatt hour so it goes from negative to positive 11 000 this is in the span of a couple hours yeah that's just here in my state it's mad all right it's just crazy anyway there you go power yeah yeah cool that's cool that's cool to play

Chris Gammell: with these charts actually i've never seen i've never seen this kind of data before oh okay well i'm

Dave Jones: surprised you guys don't have something similar i'm sure we no i'm sure we do actually yeah just yeah but it's buried away somewhere on some website you've never seen yeah yeah right yeah oh boy and i think if you've gotten like an account on this like you know you can get like a corporate account or whatever you you can actually go down to the individual plant so you can go down to see the data for an individual plant how much this you know the this large battery you know this large tesla battery array how much energy it's using and you can actually monitor the individual plant energy um yeah yeah it's crazy so well to go from very very large to very very small um i am

Chris Gammell: going to be starting a new series for work so you know people can tune out if they don't like that but it is uh basically how to build tiny things uh tiny boards and i assume this is a video course uh not a course but like a you know video series kind of thing video series and uh yeah i got my the little so we described this two shows ago but i still haven't shown it publicly but i i will probably be doing that this week uh probably after the show after what we're currently coming recording comes out but um yeah i got the the bga part i think i showed you the design before the board even yes was sent yep it's how long it's been since you've been i've talked completely redesigned it uh multiple times yeah right uh yeah yeah uh i uh so it is a 52 840 an nrf 52 840 the bga the wl csp part it turns out we were talking about a 0.4 pitch bga as i found out it is actually a 0.35 pitch bga and uh yeah it's a little bit closer than i thought but it all i think the thing that's interesting and i didn't i didn't see other people posting about it i'm sure there's some media about it somewhere i was able to get it on the jlc process the six layer process with the via and pad it just barely so the 0.35 millimeter pitch you still have to do like some pin shoes you don't use all three rows of the of the csp okay but yeah i got probably you know i think there's like 64 total gpios that are like like you're available yeah i think i got like 40 of them out of there so like oh wow significant amounts yeah and um but the the tricky thing was like the the via and pad was the exact amount of uh distance like the the exact minimum distance so i think it's 0.25 millimeters is the minimum distance and like yeah if you're at the pure extents of that that's how you have to have your your um your via and pad set up so it's all about like having your grid set up correctly so that you are putting it onto that grid because anything else is just going to air out their their um drc system and i've assembled three boards and one of them worked so one of my three assemblies worked uh so at least i validated that it it came up and yeah so how did you hand assemble that you do a little stencil yeah i ordered a stencil unfortunately i found out that um after you know multiple back and forths with jlc i sent in like probably like four or five versions of the board you know they had their engineers coming back to me and you know very helpful like no arguments with that but they made the stencil of the first design and they just they set it and forget it and it's like out the door and they didn't tell me that they made the first design i should probably should have known that and so i ended up bumping some parts around it wasn't too bad like you know the bga still lined up and like so like you know some of the helper caps around it were moved around but uh overall i'm still terrible with uh with paste descent with like paste application

Dave Jones: have you ever gotten good at that i don't do it enough it's it's one of those things if you don't do it all the time you kind of like lose the mojo you know i think that's right yeah yeah yeah and

Chris Gammell: plus this is like this isn't like a i don't have a frame right this isn't a frame stencil sure and i don't i definitely don't have a uh framing system like the kind where you actually do the application process so um yeah yeah there's a lot of stuff that could be better one thing that i am proud of and i did well i think is i actually 3d printed a jig so that it was perfectly flat with the top of the pcb so like the jig perfectly holds the shape of the the board outline in place it's got a notch so it is a circular board it doesn't rotate because i have a notch in there and it locks that in but then that is perfectly flat but it's still like i don't know i'm just still not good at it i think i don't know i i'll take tips in an email so if people want to send feedback at theamphour.com please let me know your tips i'm sure there's email videos you like you know just ways to get better this sort of thing you know i will put put it out in the universe um cool bananas yeah excellent wow so hopefully check it out i'm gonna make some videos about it but then also programming them and you know it's a sensor little sensor playground so and fun stuff for that and tell us where it's available it will be available on the goliath youtube channel it is not published yet so it'll be published probably tomorrow okay yeah so by the time this comes out i'll i'll link it in and um there'll be some i think sign up probably so got it yeah yeah hmm speaking of signups oh there's another there's another segue for us uh so of the three episodes ago we had kevin capucho on the board the jumperless v5 talking about that i've got one of those kevin well old one yep yes that's right dave has the as a review of the older one we can we can link that in too um was it a separate review

Dave Jones: or did i include in a mailbag i can't remember if i did a separate one might have been in a mailbag

Chris Gammell: might have just been a mailbag yeah yeah uh um kevin very graciously decided to send the amp hour three units uh we are going to use those as giveaways for the 2025 amp hour listener survey probably the first one in about five years yeah what have you been up to the last five years

Dave Jones: more shit things the same shit in the past five years oh boy yep all right listener survey great

Chris Gammell: yes um you know if we want to know the usual things are you still listening probably the answer

Dave Jones: yes well what what didn't we include last time that would be relevant did we include a question because i i can't remember what we include in the last survey it was so long ago right um is there is there a question about like what other podcasts do you listen to mainly oh is that a thing yeah

Chris Gammell: very good um all right yeah i don't know what i would ask differently i think probably uh maybe just some more topical things like you know like what processor are using these days would probably be kind of interesting okay yeah that'd be interesting kind of just you know it's always going to be uh like i always think about uh a lot of board houses do do uh surveys of their users and you know like some board houses are like maybe targeting low end so they're like oh look a lot of free cad and eagle or you know equivalent like low cost you know like like oh jlc is doing a lot of uh easy eda it's like of course right that's their software program so we're going to ask industry

Dave Jones: questions like you know yeah like what cad package do you use which supplier do you use which you know

Chris Gammell: um right those sort of questions what's your favorite distributor um yeah yeah yeah totally we could do we could do all that stuff um yeah you know it's kind of our survey dave so we could we can

Dave Jones: yeah we can do anything we want yeah so we'll come off the list yeah they're really annoying questions like why the hell are you asking this just want to listen to the bloody podcast you know

Chris Gammell: yeah yeah yeah we can make them optional i think it's i always love digging through the data i think we usually review it on here um yep people could try and be funny it's fine with me although we you

Dave Jones: know get like thousands of responses like we can't go through them all i did a recent eev log viewer survey and i've i've actually half shot a video uh actually risk going through the survey and it's like it's probably already like 40 minutes long or something yeah just going through god you know

Chris Gammell: yeah yep yep yeah but it is useful um and we'll do a drawing i'll ship them out so um i don't think we have any restrictions on country um for shipment so all are welcome cool we definitely hear from everybody and uh i will see if we can have any runner-up prizes too um cool bananas we can do yeah all right but uh like usual make sure you put in your contact info we're not going to spam you with anything but we do we need to find you that is probably the most consistent thing about surveys we've done in the past where it's like all these people like three or two out of our three winners

Dave Jones: were like yeah yeah i'm never talking to you again you couldn't contact them yeah i've i've i've had that before and i've had to redraw yeah stuff because you know i've done yeah live random draw and it's like well i can't contact you it's like yeah whatever totally yeah i've i've i've actually had emails back like six months later they went oh i just found your email do i still win the oscilloscope and i'm going no dude oh sorry sorry that was six months ago now you try though

Chris Gammell: yeah yeah oh boy anyway yeah what's up with you you've been doing some scope videos was that after so we talked about last time about double double uh triggering stuff like that and then i saw you

Dave Jones: were making some scope videos we talked about double trigger did we talk about uh what's it called uh

Chris Gammell: we were so we were talking about the 20 megahertz scopes that you had as a child and you were really

Dave Jones: into oh dual time time base dual time base delayed triggering yes right yeah that's it got it yes yes yeah i've been confused there for a minute yes because i i just did a recent video on um slow time bases when you you know if if you want to view like slow moving events like over seconds tens of seconds even minutes right you need to use a slow yeah you need to use a slow time base and it got me to thinking well no well because i was actually doing slow time base bench testing here i was doing some fuse testings you know fuses take you know quite a lot you know minutes to blow sometimes right so i'm yeah i've got my scope set up and i'm wondering why the scope's not bloody triggering and uh even even though like i was manually setting these fuses off and the scope wasn't triggering and then it dawned on me do i totally forgot that scopes have a pre arm time and which normally doesn't matter right but because the way scopes work by default the the trigger point is right in the middle of the screen right which is right in the middle of the memory button oh yeah so how it works is that when you press that single shot button right the memory has to fill up half of the memory has to fill up first and during that period your scope will not trigger it will not trigger because it's sitting there in pre it can go by different names pre um um you know pre fill or something like that um and your scope won't trigger during that during that time period and most of the time this is not a problem because you're using like a fast time base you know tens of milliseconds microseconds something like that right so as soon as you press the single shot button like you know it's it's it's filled up that buffer instantly but if you're at one second per division it's going to take five seconds if you're at 10 seconds per division it's going to take 50 seconds where your scope will not trigger huh right pain in the ass and on and on and on so like what is the what is the slowest you're going the time base you go yeah and and so i thought oh i'll do a video testing different types of scopes to see how they handle this and key sites the most convoluted one um siglant's really good because it has a ready lead on the front panel that actually lights up and tells you oh i'm now ready to trigger so that lead will stay off for those five seconds or 50 seconds or whatever it is when it's pre-arming when it's pre-filling that memory so you know and yeah and then i found some quirks in in a couple of the key site scopes here and and uh the rodent schwartz i just did a second an additional second channel video where it's not just a manufacturer thing and different same scopes from the different manufacturer can work differently and and actually display these things and operate display the waveforms totally different from the same manufacturer depending on which model it is so yeah it's it's you know it's a weird thing that most people don't think about they just go put up with it kind of thing so i thought i'd do a video yeah showing that this is a a trap really that's a good one because because if your scope doesn't trigger then you might think oh you've set up your trigger settings wrong or you know your your level's not right and you could spend ages trying to figure out why your scope's not triggering when it's actually just the default operation of scope that causes that problem right you know right and if you're setting up these

Chris Gammell: experiments that are like super slow time as well like you might be waiting you might be waiting an

Dave Jones: hour like yeah why didn't it happen yeah why didn't that why didn't my scope trigger i'm sure i got my trigger level right yes it's dc coupling it's not something stupid like ac coupling or you know like yeah and then yeah and it doesn't trigger and you could waste you know hours or days even yeah wondering why your bloody thing's not triggering this yeah pre-arm time so yeah just be aware of that that's a good that's a good one that's a good one yeah yep little quirk of scopes and and every and all the operation and all the manufacturers work differently

Chris Gammell: you know yeah so it's like yeah i was talking to a co-worker about this today uh i remembered uh a bash this is going to be adjacent but it'll come back to the point i promise it was like a i remembered a different co-worker telling me a command to like return to a a folder when you're like doing command line stuff right and i could not remember what it was you know like i usually think of like cd space uh like the squiggly yeah that like takes you to the home folder but there's one that actually like takes you if you like are in a folder and then you switch to a whole different you know cd to some like yes wild somewhere else yeah yeah well if you do cd space dash as i had to look up and like try and figure out how to google cd space dash is this a linux thing or is does this work under at least a linux thing maybe just a bash thing i'm not sure right take you back to where you just went from very very useful oh that's interesting yeah i didn't know it's really great right but unless you're listening to a podcast or unless you have a co-worker who tells you this stuff like like how do you learn this stuff and and honestly it actually it made me think back to our last episode we talked about it's like probably in the old days it was reading the man

Dave Jones: page right it was like oh it was like you would have a cheat sheet for all the commands or something and then you would read the cheat sheet and you go oh i didn't know you could do that really yeah

Chris Gammell: yeah you know that is how i taught myself tcad basically is the is the help menu like the little

Dave Jones: question mark help menu or sometimes back in the day when you bought a program it had come with a laminated cheat sheet oh yeah you know and then you'd stick that sucker on your wall you know totally yeah i mean then people still do that right right yeah yep yeah but it feels like this so it feels

Chris Gammell: like this a skill is a trigger thing too like you're not going to do it until you run smack into it right until you run into the problem yeah and at least now maybe i and other people listening to this or will be aware of this yeah would be like have this in the you know the mental library so that later exactly like i wonder if i should look into this one thing yeah yeah it can be it can be counter because it could be like if you have too many things in like your in your your memory for this sort of thing it's a you you try all the things it could be and then it usually it's like more of an occam's razor kind of thing it's like okay well what is the most likely of these it might not be the the super obscure thing but right still having it there is is yeah yeah no it's good and yeah i'm

Dave Jones: i'm surprised it's i as far as i know nobody's ever done a video or a tutorial or whatever like specifically on this thing you know that is you know it's it's not an uncommon thing i mean a lot of scopes for small well almost every digital scope will have a roll mode for um slow time bases in in fact there's a quite a few scopes will automatically enter roll mode if you turn the time base down enough or they'll have a selection where it can do that where you can toggle it to do that you know it'll automatically switch to roll mode which it basically becomes a chart recorder in that sense so it continually updates the screen as it's like a scroller you know it's like those old uh 2d scroller games you know it scrolls across the screen and you know yeah yeah i really like that if you're

Chris Gammell: going like if you have a lot of data as well like you know for like tracking ice per sea traffic and just kind of like then you have like this large visual like kind of view of things happened here

Dave Jones: and it was about five seconds ago or something yeah exactly and you can see you know it's good to be able to see these things pop up as it scrolls across the screen it's a good visual indicator unfortunately a lot of people don't know that most scopes will not trigger at all in uh roll mode so yes you can only start and stop you can't actually trigger it to stop in roll mode so which is a bit of a bummer some some scopes do do it but most don't so yeah just be aware of that okay yeah traps young players totally yeah that's a good one that's a good one old timer here old timer speaking of product design um yeah because this varies by manufacturer friend of the show jeff uh geelin can we talk about his video because this blew up i was seeing this video sorry the lamp is april fool's lamp or something else no no the uh bosch dishwasher the bosch dishwasher the internet of stupid i i will not no his title of his video is i won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud yeah and my god i was seeing this video popping up everywhere in on on on on i think he hit the case with that one yeah he he hit the yeah he really hit a nerve with joe average on on this one and it's like yeah he bought this new bosch dishwasher and i i like bosch dishwashers they work well um and yeah and he and it turns out only after he got it home installed it and everything and that's quite a lot of work to get your what dishwasher actually delivered hooked up and installed and everything right you know it's a lot of effort to get to that point and only then did he realize that a couple of the main features of it were not available unless you a connected it to your wi-fi b downloaded their proprietary app c gave them all your bloody you know private info and access and everything else right yeah um and then you could enable via the app only a couple of like like features that are normally just basic on a dishwasher yeah i think it's like cycle or something like that yeah it's just like what what the hell yeah what is with these companies like i like i can understand adding a wi-fi option for those that want it right oh okay i can see that my dishwasher is finished it'll alert me on my shoe phone right okay fine if you want to connect it but to tie that

Chris Gammell: into basic features that you don't get what i think they must be doing some kind of like activation code or something like so like out of the factory it's the dumbest version and then you have to like activate it based on the code and you know what you paid for blah blah blah yeah it's oh my god it's

Dave Jones: just it's just so bad yeah unbelievable and everyone's going return it just return it and it's like do you know how much effort it was to like install this and how much effort it is to de-install it and then try and ship back a giant bloody dishwasher like you know so he's kind of like just has to take it up the rear you know it's like just got to like bend over and take it unfortunately like yeah really sucks really sucks anyway that that video really hit a chord with a lot of even non-technical people so yeah yeah ah how are these companies so stupid how can you like there must have been like a boardroom meeting about this right there must have been like a meeting oh what stuff can we

Chris Gammell: include in you know there has to have been a meeting for someone to many meetings many many

Dave Jones: meetings for people to decide this shit and it's like nobody stood up and said like i know i think this is a bad idea it should only be optional and it's like i've been i've been in meetings like that

Chris Gammell: before i think it usually comes down to like well we couldn't possibly do it any other way because of xyz you know all these historic reasons yeah yeah it's like the workaround or the workaround or the workaround or the workaround yeah and then i think there are a lot fewer jeff gearlings of the world than there are yes you know just consumers and i think that's unfortunately how it goes right i mean like that's just so that's why it's great we have jeff similar right yeah like he's using

Dave Jones: that platform but was the goal to get people to sign into your app so that you can like harvest their data what like is that the goal because like it just seems no i would get i mean like you know

Chris Gammell: giving it the most charitable definition would be honestly it would be like well how else are we going to act you know there's a problem with like okay so i know a little bit iot devices uh so imagine you have a product and it rolls off the production line from some unknown place right it's like you uh you tell it you program with it's you know like a bootstrap firmware that might have like some test software the tests you know the motor and the dishwasher the leds that they you know someone at the production facility without having any other knowledge they can like say yes this is working to power on self-test type stuff and then it probably hooks up to some server probably over wi-fi if this is a wi-fi based device and gets like the latest firmware down onto it uh but that's not ultimately the end user right like jeff in this case is the end user and so like he has to either he uses the default version or he then registers into their system they validate the purchase has actually been made and then they give you know quote unquote give him the things that he's purchased right this is all like this is making cory doctor of scream somewhere right cory's just like screaming on the toilet somewhere uh it's gentrification um anyways um so that's what i think about is like that process i'm not saying i agree with it but like i could at least give that charitable viewing of it whether or

Dave Jones: not they actually yeah yeah i think what probably happened is there's a division in bosch who just do apps right and shit like this and and then they're looking at their data and they're going nobody's signing up and using our app how can we get people to use our app so they pushed for like oh i know how we can get people to use our app if we you know if there's valuable features that they need then they will sign up and use your app and then you get your app kpi up right the key performance indicator

Chris Gammell: right and then boom it's a little more cynical but i could i could see that as plausible right that's totally plausible that is dilbert plausible yes yeah totally yeah i think oh man in terms of like true engagement like what are they yeah i guess if it's like their kp like you're saying the kpi needs to go up like it's not actually like building a brand or like enabling other things right it's not like oh i'm gonna download this new app to my to my dishwasher after the fact but for those who don't

Dave Jones: know how large corporations work like every every group in every subgroup usually has some form of kpi or key performance indicator which justifies their existence basically right and it doesn't matter whether it's the human resources group doesn't matter where is the bloody ridiculous dei groups it doesn't matter whether it's the app group doesn't matter whether it's the hardware group or the production group or whatever they've all got their key performance indicators which they've got to use to justify their thing so they're all often battling against each other sometimes to you know um get their marketing departments have their kpis and everyone has their own kpis so they're often battling against each other um to try and keep their key performance indicator up even if it hits

Chris Gammell: some other division you know so again it's very cynical but i i see what you're saying yeah it's how it works yeah yeah yeah yeah it it is often i feel like it is it's all about reward systems and how people are yep um yeah i think often when you're interacting with like organizations uh you can find out a lot about someone's motivation based on like how they are being rewarded so yes totally

Dave Jones: so what dave said yeah yeah my my bonus at the end of the year depends on my kpi being above right 10.0 or something i don't know whatever and it's like yeah and you do it by hook or by crook right and it's just yep and if and if you have to screw over some other group i'm fine that's their problem not yours oh man it's like well i suppose uh this is the time of the show where we should talk

Chris Gammell: about how i'm i'm you know i'm i'm in the u.s and uh i'm getting screwed over a little bit on my purchasing power here dave and mostly my building stuff uh has it actually started yet is it like is it immediate impact it is i think two days from now i believe april 9th is the date of the tariffs right tariffs is what we're talking about in the u.s everything's up in the air but i have no idea

Dave Jones: what level is this in acting act because i haven't looked into the mind minutiae of it like is it like okay all components in in that you're buying from mouse or in hijiki is suddenly going to have a bloody tariff on them every pcb you order from china is going to have a like what everything yeah

Chris Gammell: what happens everything anything that is tariffed is going up right anything that is not yeah but

Dave Jones: what my my point is what is tariffed like our individual components tariff everything you know

Chris Gammell: everything like literally it's across the board flat that's like that that is the current that is the current understanding no there are some carve outs but yeah so so it's country based it's not um industry based that's right yep right okay got it yeah and so i did see on one of the newsletters i follow there are already some carve outs for like taiwan and chipsets right so it's like okay right all right okay so that i'm sure there's going to be other rollback type things like oh i'm sure if you're building military electronics in the u.s i'm sure you're going to have some good carve out too like i just i i can't imagine it not going otherwise like that's the you know it's a key business in the u.s with a lot of lobbying power um yeah i think it's just gonna everything everything's going to get more expensive i think it's going to have some severe ripples i i i don't know what's going to

Dave Jones: stick i'm sure some of it's not going to stick permanent it's a negotiating tactic it's all i'm sure all of that stuff but it all could go out of the wash by the time we release the episode

Chris Gammell: you know it very well could but yeah if it doesn't you know i just think about oh yeah right across the like i just look at my board right so like i have this little board that i designed and like there is nothing american made on this board you know like i've got a boss sensor i've got a pcb from china i've got resistors from sams or caps from samsung and you know just like it is we the electronics world is a completely global supply chain right i mean it's just like really it's all over the place and man oh i don't yeah i okay i think what i really would like to say is uh let's pour one out for our our friends at digikey mouser and all the other distributors who

Dave Jones: have to figure all this crap out you know yeah yeah yeah yeah it gets complex yes it's bad

Chris Gammell: someone's spreadsheet stuff is getting real bad real real fast uh so yeah oh man oh man yeah

Dave Jones: in terms of like poor data people at digikey or something just and just like the the back and

Chris Gammell: forth of it all too right i mean like yeah like you said it could go down it could go up more it but like but like when i if i order a you know a thing on a friday and like you know who knows if they have to like apply new tariffs on a monday you know like it's just like it's just it's madness um i i'm obviously very against this i you're both as a consumer i politically yes of course but like uh i i really don't know um yeah i can i offer a pro tip yeah pro tip do not make any long-term

Dave Jones: major decisions based on what's happening now right i think you'll come to regret that like oh i'm no i'm shutting down my manufacturing company because i'm not going no i this will not you know no i i think that's a big mistake do not make long-term decisions based on what's happening yeah i think

Chris Gammell: that's right yeah yeah yeah don't do it on what's said because it could blow over in weeks or months

Dave Jones: and it's all nothing and you shut down your company and you've gone off you know to i don't know um farm goats or something you know to herd goats or something farm goats yeah i don't know whatever like that room in uh severance no no i've only watched the first couple episodes of severance

Chris Gammell: sorry man dave get on that good lord all right oh all right we'll talk after this about that

Dave Jones: talk about differences my goodness do not make long-term decisions based on this you'll come to

Chris Gammell: regret it guarantee it yeah i mean so on so like i've been thinking about this for my own stuff right like i'm gonna i am not going to stop building electronics because literally i don't know what else i'd do right i mean i guess i talk to people about stuff but usually i talk to people about electronics like i think i'm like okay well if i fuck man i don't know um but i think what it ends up what i end up thinking is like i am not going like so just to state it plainly there is very little silicon that is like completely american made and packaged and like available right like there are some moves towards it i think we mentioned eagle electronics is like a even if you got like ti

Dave Jones: who's and and your fabs manufactured in texas or whatever right their packaging plant is not in

Chris Gammell: texas in in the philippines or whatever that's right exactly so it's like and you know they're making moves towards packaging potentially you know it's like some of the chips act which is apparently maybe under the knife too it is like they were trying to do packaging in the states which i applaud yep but like yep that's not for me that's for military folks like that's for like medical and like high value things it's just not me you know like even even all the stuff like i am i am buying bargain basement parts effectively i'm buying the off cuts i'm buying the you know i'm buying the the the hooves and and snouts of of the electronics world right uh interesting can i make

Dave Jones: an interesting point what happens i assume that stock that's already in the country is not affected

Chris Gammell: correct there's some i haven't looked close enough i think i saw some provision this is now hearsay so like don't don't take this word but i i i heard that there was also some like retroactive provision as well which again is like i don't know how that works yeah that's yeah okay so right but just to talk about like let's just talk about like the actual existing supply chain as it is right now like i just i cannot source 100 like so if i want to avoid tariffs there is nothing i can realistically build on a best on like the best day that like there's nothing really that i could do like that and now because of this what's going to also happen is we're going to see shifting supply chains that are also chasing this right because there are going to be some cost sensitive applications that are like well i have to try and like have fewer tariffs so they are going to do that and like you know to their benefit right like there could be a potentially a build-up like in a best case scenario which i don't think it's going to be but in a best case scenario it would drive more factory um build-outs in the u.s that would serve that market that also wants to avoid tariff okay i get it like that's the theoretical i just don't think on a timeline that's realistic i don't think it will ever actually happen i think what dave says by the time that happens the tariffs would go away or get renegotiated whatever blah blah blah so like i don't think that's actually the plan but like so in my mind the like the the i'll do the best i can to source stuff that's probably already u.s based right that's just like a choosing stuff off the shelf a versus b like okay if there's an equivalent that's like a little bit more like that's the economic decision fine i'll probably do that uh but i think i think the real thing i that i'm coming to is like i need to now go to the chinese ecosystem and find the cheapest stuff i could possibly do yeah right pay the tariff and then

Dave Jones: because they pay the tariff and it's less than the total is less than exactly yeah yeah right

Chris Gammell: because it doesn't make sense otherwise like anything else is like so like yeah so this now leads me to something that i'm going to give you all relief and stop talking about tariffs i think there are parts that are like in the ecosystem that are amazing and like bottom of the barrel that are coming out like cost-wise bottom of the barrel yes right so like the so the ch32 v003 we talked about on the show yes there's a new part called the ch572 it's basically the ch32 v003 with bluetooth on it as well for like 20 like 15 cents and it's like oh okay i'll just do that yeah it's insane like yeah it's nuts so ultimately i think a lot of this stuff is going to have unintended consequences but like thinking about my own like personal decisions in a design context around this sort of thing i think i'm just going to race towards the lowest possible cost option pay the tariffs on it because it seems like the tariffs are unavoidable air anyways and then just work within that ecosystem and until the until they somehow ratchet which i don't think there will be like unless you get to like so like if i have a two dollar chip that's sourceable in the u.s somehow right like as i guess uh assuming the ti parts like the cc 2640 or something like that this 2641 is a bluetooth chip right if that's two dollars and i could somehow buy it for two dollars a digi key which i i'm almost certain i cannot uh i mean what would i have to have a two thousand percent tariff to get to the same level on a 10 cent chip yeah so okay exactly like i don't think we're gonna get to that point so like it still behooves me to go to the chinese ecosystem and just go bottom of the barrel and see the best i can do like so now the optimization episode exercise is finding the bottom of the barrel doing the best i can with that maybe quality degrades a little bit or i spend more more like man hours to like build up libraries and workarounds and all that other stuff but it definitely doesn't hit the i'm not the the test case right it's it's not me it's other manufacturing but like as an individual that's what i'm thinking about is like that's the direction i'm probably going to go interesting and it sucks i hate it i really hate it this is just all of this is just so unnecessary it's really dumb i think it's gonna have a lot of impacts in the industry i think it's gonna unfortunately cause um some economic hardship for a lot of folks and if any is any of you i'm sorry

Dave Jones: you know i feel for you so well that means i can make shit here cheaper maybe yeah i mean i'm actually i can't because our aussie dollar has just gone down the absolute toilet so you know

Chris Gammell: yeah i mean but like i am like you know there's like an intellectual curiosity about this madness like what pops out the other side like is is it realistic to manufacture in australia like i don't know it could be right but it might not be australia but it might be like some other

Dave Jones: goals based on what's happening now yeah yeah it's just i think that's the thing it's it's mass

Chris Gammell: uncertainty and uh yeah i just feel for all the people that have to deal with this it's it's and cats living together yeah that sounds right that's hysteria yeah yep yep that's hysteria

Dave Jones: all right can that be the title of this episode mass hysteria mass hysteria mass hysteria yeah it feels like it yeah why not why not yeah let's do it yeah yeah yeah it's good let's have some fun let's do a ghostbusters themed uh ghostbusters man best best ever i just tweeted oh did i know what

Chris Gammell: i was listening about uh i think it was like a youtube short or something but about uh ray what's not ray who's the guy that sang the song um ray parker jr porter was it ray ray parker jr parker ray parker yes yeah so like he got sued because it was that song was basically uh i want a new drug by hugo lewis oh right okay right like yes and so like yeah they ripped away all those uh royalties from this very very famous song both both songs are famous but you know i'd say of course ghostbusters is instantly recognizable by a broader swath probably made more money uh he ended up re-getting those royalties again like i don't know i don't know the full story but like interesting they like overturned the decision at some point right yeah

Dave Jones: cool steal like an artist folks yeah right oh boy yes he did add the really no i'm not gonna say

Chris Gammell: what he did add what come on he did add the important line for the ghostbusters bustin makes

Dave Jones: me feel good bustin makes me feel good yes absolutely oh man oh boy i uh tweeted just this morning that um the greatest um the best ai movie ever made the best movie about ai was made 42 years ago it's called

Chris Gammell: war games war games that that is that's a good one dave i agree with that yeah yep yep yeah just just

Dave Jones: like ghostbusters is the greatest startup movie ever made oh that's a good one too it's haven't you heard it is a startup story yeah yeah it is a startup story it's a pure startup story they're limited they they they had to mortgage the house to get the loan they had to find they had to find a new market they they captured the uh franchise the franchise rights i was thinking about franchise the merchandise yeah merchant merch that it was it was it was it's a startup movie ghostbusters is a

Chris Gammell: startup movie yeah i like it yeah that's good that's good ah take that hollywood make something as

Dave Jones: good as that yeah i just went to see minecraft yesterday that's a movie yeah minecraft movie yes i actually went to the cinema to see it okay yeah um it'll make a billion dollars i don't doubt it yeah i i'll briefly cover my review which i posted on x of course um okay is that um i have never encountered um audience participation like this since the only thing i can remember is star wars uh fever i'll just

Chris Gammell: say like uh oh my god is it uh rocky horror maybe like rocky horror picture show no no i mean no those are very i mean you haven't probably gone but you know no those are very very strong uh audience

Dave Jones: participation yeah but i'm talking about movie you know rocky or picture show is a movie yes i know but like it only happened once and that was what 19 when was that late 70s late 70s that's what i think

Chris Gammell: late 70s yeah late 70s like yeah what do you mean it only happened once they're like they would do showings where like everybody would get up and act and be dressed up and no it's the same thing as the star wars thing i think but anyways okay so what were you saying about the the minecraft movie so like

Dave Jones: people showed up with like blocky swords and stuff oh yeah yeah and like you know block helmet things but the thing is right before the movie even started they actually you know they're showing the previews and everything they turned the lights back on and the manager came in right the theater manager came in and said look sorry to interrupt but um viewings of this movie we've had hundreds of complaints of people from from customers and that they movie was spoiled because everyone was screaming and shouting and getting too excited during the movie so if you could just calm it down a bit that would be much appreciated they were getting hundreds of complaints and um as it as it turns out that's a banger yeah and as it turns out uh no the audience couldn't contain themselves especially near the end of the movie there was shouting screaming dancing um you know there was like yeah it was it was nuts man sounds like uh the people who love minecraft really love mine yeah so this bloody thing's gonna make a billion dollars yeah that sounds like it yeah yeah that sounds like

Chris Gammell: the kind of thing where like people would go back and yeah for the experience yes they would go for the

Dave Jones: experience it was mad it was and it's it's kind of a i know nothing about minecraft so other than it's apart from my kids playing it they're obsessed with it and they know all the lore and the nuance and everything and you know so everyone was shouting out during the movie and you know it's like a pig rider

Chris Gammell: or something i don't know um you know like i dave i think you and i we are both the olds yes we are yeah i don't think i don't think it's getting any better for us buddy anyway it's gonna be it's

Dave Jones: gonna be hugely popular okay even though it's even though it's meh you know it's kind of it's like you know there's no payoff in it like i i actually really liked and sorry i'm gonna nerd out a little bit but i really liked uh jason momoa's um character um garbage man he's called and they and they build up his character at the start he's he's like a 1980s uh retro video game champion right so he's this yeah and he's been um you know for the last 30 years you know he he's just been milking his fame from that kind of thing you know from from being the you know the video game champion of you know 1985 or something and and so they build all this up as as in like he's the world's best gamer and i thought ah this is going to pay off in the movie right he's going to use his gaming skills no doesn't happen doesn't happen it's like no sorry for the spoiler but yeah it doesn't doesn't happen no so yeah i was disappointed with that anyway there you go minecraft fever yeah it's nuts

Chris Gammell: that's great i've yep yeah i think i will probably get to go to a cinema in about five to seven years so

Dave Jones: oh right yes yeah kids yeah yeah yeah they'll be at that age i'll be watching something like like like the latest disney flop yeah right yeah right the latest disney remake now they're

Chris Gammell: trashing the yeah yeah oh boy yeah good luck all right man well catch you next week yeah i'll see you soon

Dave Jones: bye

Dave Jones: That was a good one. Can we hear it? On the computer.